One of the world’s largest banks, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), has leveraged Gen-i’s ICT solutions expertise to open their first branch and become the first Chinese bank in New Zealand.

Since establishing in 1984, the ICBC has developed into one of the largest listed banks in the world in terms of market capitalization. A subsidiary of the ICBC, ICBC New Zealand gained its operational permit from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in November 2013, and recently opened its first branch and Head Office at 2 Queen Street, Auckland.

Gen-i’s General Manager Corporate Clients, Steve Mills says ICBC New Zealand chose Gen-i on the strength of the company’s reputation for providing exceptional local ICT solutions and support for international companies, including some of New Zealand’s largest financial institutions.

“Setting up a new bank is not an easy process, and while the ICBC is a major international bank, their set-up team had a relatively small level of resource, so were in need of the best local expertise to meet the requirements of the Reserve Bank.”

The ICBC needed to show that they had a working local IT test environment with connectivity back to China. Mills says Gen-i provided this at their own site, while building an on premise data centre for ICBC in the PwC building, with the help of partners APC and Westcon.

“We developed a strong working relationship with ICBC that was built on trust, which helped make the set-up process as simple as possible for ICBC and delivered cost effective solutions.”

Mills says Gen-i’s ability to help ICBC overcome the cultural differences between New Zealand and China was a key factor in the success of the project.

“We have a diverse workforce here at Gen-i and we utilised our Mandarin speaking staff to assist with delivery of the solution for ICBC and advise on best local practice, which the ICBC greatly appreciated.”

Mills says supporting the establishment of ICBC’s first branch was particularly rewarding the bank’s new local presence will increase the opportunities for New Zealand companies to do business with China.

“As a country, we are already doing $18.2B worth of business with China every year, and ICBC’s presence in New Zealand will have flow-on benefits for trade and tourism between our countries for years to come. So this is not only a big deal for Gen-i, but also for New Zealand.”

The ICBC currently has a presence in six continents, across 40 countries and regions. The Bank provides comprehensive financial products and services to 4.6 million corporate customers and 411 million personal customers by virtue of the distribution network consisting of 17,225 domestic institutions, 389 overseas institutions and over 1,661 correspondent banks worldwide.

For the setup of the new office and branch, Gen-i worked alongside ICBC to design and configure their telecommunications (Voice and Internet), networking, and data centre infrastructure needs. Gen-i also supported ICBC with the equipment and environment they needed to carry out technical tests during the Reserve Bank registration process.

Gen-i’s solution for ICBC, deployed over the last six months, has included multiple Gen-i Internet Services, Gen-i WAN services over fibre, and critical data centre componentry such as racking, cooling and power management, as well as providing their servers, networking infrastructure, PCs and video-conferencing equipment.